1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to technologies and methods for managing personal contact information, and more particularly to management of online personal contact information for real-time online collaboration, conference and message facilities.
2. Background of the Invention
Online collaboration and messaging in real-time has become very popular in recent years. Programs and services such as America Online's (“AOL”) Instant Messenger (“IM”), Microsoft's NetMeeting, and Lotus' Sametime are well-known programs and services which allow real-time white board collaboration, chatting, conference sessions and instant messaging via a corporate intranet and/or the Internet.
Using programs and services such as these, a plurality of online users may participate in a joint conference involving text messaging, application program sharing, and real-time photo and video sharing. Many companies have begun to use these services in place of actual face-to-face meetings of personnel which are physically or geographically dispersed.
During these “virtual” meetings, often times one participant will supply other participants with drawings, presentation graphics, and text for discussion. The ensuing discussion between the participants may be logged to a file for later review, which is more convenient than the record keeping mechanisms of actual physical face-to-face meetings. As such, these online virtual meetings and conversations provide advantages over traditional face-to-face meetings, not the least of which are automatic record keeping, reduced travel costs and greater convenience.
Turning to FIG. 3, the arrangement of components of these types of real-time online collaboration systems is shown. A number of collaboration clients (32) are interconnected through a computer network (31). These collaboration clients typically comprise a personal computer equipped with software such as Netscape's Navigator™, AOL's Instant Messenger™, or Lotus' Sametime Connect™ client product. These collaboration clients (32) may also include other computing platforms such as personal digital assistants (“PDA”) and advanced web-enabled wireless telephones.
The collaboration clients (32) may interface to the computer network (31) through a number of well-known technologies including, but not limited to, Transmission Control/Internet Protocol (“TCP/IP”), dial-up modems, cable modems, asymmetric digital subscriber line (“ADSL”), or other interface technologies such as wireless interfaces.
Typically, the collaboration client (32) maintains a local contact list (33), such as AOL Instant Messenger's “buddy list” or Netscape Navigators “address book.” These contact lists (33) may take the form of simple text files, or as advanced as database files. In some cases, the contact list are stored in proprietary formats.
When an online meeting or collaboration session is established, each new participant may supply the other participants with his or her email address as he or she logs into the session. The other participants may then chose to store that email address in their local contact list. In some cases, such as with the Instant Messenger product, there are other options for users to transmit their entire contact list to other meeting participants.
In general, however, these email addresses as well as any other participant contact information which is exchanged between participants is defined and by the participants themselves. This means that a participant logging in to a virtual meeting may supply accurate and complete information regarding his or her email address and other contact data, such as telephone and company location. However, a participant may choose not to supply some of this information, or may supply incorrect information.
Another method for exchanging personnel information and automatically storing it into such a contact list is called a “vCard”. A vCard is a data record that may be attached automatically to an email message, if an email user desires to share his or her vCard with recipients of his or her messages.
A vCard which may contain a number of personal information data items as defined by the sender or originator. This may include email address (e.g. “return email address”), personal or company physical address, telephone numbers, and other descriptive information as defined by the sender.
vCards are an industry standard format data developed by a consortium including Apple, ATT, IBM, and others. Responsibility for maintaining and evolving the vCard specification was assumed by the Internet Mail Consortium (“IMC”) in 1996.
By attaching vCards to an email message, a sender may enable the recipient to automatically store information into his or her contact list which is contained in the vCard. For example, a sender of an email message may wish to enable a recipient to automatically store the sender's name, email address, telephone number, position title, and company name into the recipient's address book without having to type it. Upon receipt, the recipient can select an automatic function in his or hers email client software which extracts the information from the attached vCard and stores it into his or her local address book. Later, the recipient may use that information in the address book to address new messages, export to other application programs such as word processors and contact managers, and to load into other databases.
As all of these currently available methods and systems rely on information which is defined and supplied by the sender or the originator of the information, such as a newly joined member of a virtual online conference, these methods and systems are subject to inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the data which may be stored into the recipient's or other participant's address books or contact lists.
For example, one participant in a online conference may supply a full set of information including his name, job title, telephone numbers, and company name. Another participant in the same conference may only supply his email address. When all of the participants in the conference store all of the information supplied by the other participants into their local contact lists, they may later find that their contact list has varying levels of degree of details in the information about each of those participants (and may contain errors).
Later, when one of the participants wants to contact another participant, such as by making a telephone call to that participant, he may or not be able to find that telephone number based upon the information which was or was not supplied by the participant during the online conference.
Therefore, as the vCard industry standard and as the proprietary information standards of the various online conferencing services and suppliers do not assure accuracy or enforce uniformity of detail of the information supplied by online conference participants, the very flexibility of the system becomes a disadvantage of the systems as well.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and a method which allow participants of online conferences and collaboration sessions to automatically store reliable and accurate information regarding the participants of those sessions. There is also a need in the art for this system and method to provide a consistent level of detail of information about each participant so that the participants may rely upon the contents of their local contact list in the future.